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Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

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211–220 of 269 posts

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#211
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of helping people understand their AWS bill. But I'm not sure what the tradeoff is. They have a lot of services with a lot of options. The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs.

Their egress bandwidth pricing definitely wasn't designed to meet my needs. I forget how many orders of magnitude above market it was when I priced it out, but it was ugly.

The complexity is to meet customer needs, not the prices themselves. But aren't you glad they have bandwidth tiers so the more you use the cheaper it gets? :)

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs. That's a surprisingly charitable interpretation.

It's a valid one. Engineering teams work with AWS kinda in the same way mass market 90s C code was written. They get it running, but boy are there huge leaks and crashes hiding in plain sight. From that perspective, I think it might be ok to say that most eng folk complaining about AWS billing need a safer language (higher level abstraction) where they are protected from causing harm or being harmed.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The disk you attach to an instance is not free, and capacity/performance characteristics dictate price.

It's possible that was the issue, but I estimated a 20gb storage partition. Maybe usage was to blame, I know the server was inefficient with reads and writes.

But what did you actually assign? EBS volumes are priced based on provisioned capacity (including throughput if you choose io2 volumes).

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#214

Every time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel, I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand a thing.

I'm not a Microsoft fan (he writes from his Linux desktop) but I was astonished that Azure actually has working "This is how much we can spend, and literally no more" behaviour coming from previously working with AWS where that's either entirely unavailable or black magic known only to experts.

Why does it have that? Because Azure gives away $150/ month Azure credits to students with Visual Studio. If Azure "mistakenly" lets a student spend $5000 it doesn't get to bill their credit card or chase them with debt collectors, those student accounts don't have any money, don't have a credit card, may have no bank account, so long as some institution paid for Visual Studio licenses there may not even be a real human being behind them. So, the only option for Microsoft is to have a water-tight shut off once you spend $150. Added 1TB of SSD to a virtual machine when you meant 1GB? That's gonna burn your $150 real fast. Accidentally picked the turbo-fast Azure SQL instance instead of the toy one you actually needed to demo Power BI? Ditto. But you don't get an enormous bill and then hope they let you off, the credit runs out and everything goes dark instead.

Amazon seems to believe that so few people care about this they don't need to compete. Maybe they're even right. But I, for one, don't want to risk my life savings every time I'm on a screen where a fat-finger costs $5000 per hour, so Azure looks pretty attractive.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what? https://www.apple.com/us-hed/store https://images.apple.com/business-docs/VPP_Business_Guide.pd... https://www.apple.com/retail/business/ > Our Small Business Experts are ready to help. They’ll advise you on the devices to fit your budget, including special pricing,* and find you the best financing option. All backed by ongoing support to give you much-needed peace of mind. > * Special pricing availabl…

The point was that it’s a marginal discount. I never said that there’s no discount.

>Based on Apple not giving a shit what volume you’re buying, the price is the price. Maybe the rules are a bit different for Amazon, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

You're backpedaling now. Nowhere in your first comment was there any reference to degrees or margins - it was all or nothing (the "price is the price").

It's ok to admit you were mistaken.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#216
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Amazon scale, I imagine they strip the original chassis and use only the motherboard with custom power and cooling for some insane density. As visible here https://youtu.be/R4ArjHz4gd4?t=192 you could save some significant space doing so.

Sorry to disappoint you https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/AWS-...

Well, I guess Amazon get to keep their warranty...

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#217
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Google Fi. Once I exceed my paid for bandwidth level for a given month it notifies me. When I go 50% over it notifies me a second time. If I want to know the bandwidth used I can check it anytime I want on my phone. Considering the huge amount of developers having problems of this kind how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?

Google did this to me with Adwords. They gave me a "free" $200 to run a test campaign but it never turned off and I was not notified in anyway. They ended up charging me $800 for a completely test campaign for a non product blog website that ended up not even getting any traffic. Very scummy behavior even worse than AWS. It was basically extortion because I would have lost my entire Google account if I disputed the c…

This is why I don't like to sign my credit card to any subscription service or anything similar. There is almost no way to delete the credit card, and it is hard to notice the charging before it happened. We should have legislation to make them offer one-shot charging without storing my payment information. Pay as my budget. Shutdown if exceed.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't just firing up a virtual machine on over-provisioned hardware, they're dedicating an entire bare metal machine to you. It is in their interests to make that worthwhile commercially.

These are Apple's terms that Amazon is following, not the other way around. You are getting bare metal that you have to reserve for a minimum of 24 hours because that's how Apple allows it to be licensed not because that's what Amazon thought would make the most sense.

I run VMware esxi on my Mac mini with 64G of memory to create plenty of macos and Linux vms. Are you saying this is against the TOS?

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did this to me with Adwords. They gave me a "free" $200 to run a test campaign but it never turned off and I was not notified in anyway. They ended up charging me $800 for a completely test campaign for a non product blog website that ended up not even getting any traffic. Very scummy behavior even worse than AWS. It was basically extortion because I would have lost my entire Google account if I disputed the c…

This is why I don't like to sign my credit card to any subscription service or anything similar. There is almost no way to delete the credit card, and it is hard to notice the charging before it happened. We should have legislation to make them offer one-shot charging without storing my payment information. Pay as my budget. Shutdown if exceed.

Privacy.com

Doesn't cost anything, can use different bank accounts for funding on a per card basis, configurable limits.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#220

Every time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel, I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand a thing.

After my experience 3 years ago, I will never use them again. I priced out an instance that estimated around $30/month via their calculator. Instance is indeed around $30 for the first 2 months, then I get a $200 bill. I don't know what the hell happened, but it was over 6x what I had budgeted. I tried to get someone to review my account, but I didn't get a response and just had to suck it up. I paid the $200 and mov…

A fellow Linode aficionado!

I had a similar experience as you. You are getting lured in by the free tier, but then this paid additional service is needed and that paid on top. Didn't work for me at all.

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